Creation, Consumption, and Control of Sensitive Content

Censorship is widely observed in both developed and developing countries across the globe. Many policy makers and platforms filter out certain sensitive content to reduce its consumption and the corresponding social damage. However, censorship cannot perfectly eliminate all sensitive content, and content creators have various information transmission channels to circumvent censorship systems. In this paper, we construct a game-theoretic model to study the creation, consumption, and control of sensitive content. Our paper seeks to answer whether policy interventions, such as strengthening censorship, can help a social planner reduce social harm caused by the consumption of sensitive content. First, when censorship strength is at a low or high level, tightening censorship limits the spread of sensitive content; however, when censorship strength is at an intermediate level, strengthening censorship can lead to higher social harm. This is because stricter censorship can motivate creators to choose a more harmful, secret channel rather than a less harmful, open channel to transmit messages. The larger consumption volume of sensitive content in the secret channel can generate greater social damage. Our first result implies that regulators who seek to minimize social damage may take a loose censorship strategy. Second, our paper reveals that raising creators’ content creation cost can result in higher damage for the society. Third, when creators need to incur a higher cost upon being censored out, social harm can increase.